What I'm working toward.

As I suggested yesterday, now is the time in an academic year when thoughts seem to behave like crazed starlings: when they're quiet, all billion of them in the same tree, it's not because they're really quiet. It's because they're saving energy for the next mad uprush from branch after branch beside branch, into the steeling expanse of evening sky. They'll cry their manic cries as they dip and swerve as a flickering flashing body, and then they'll land again and seem to be quiet. But they won't really be quiet. They'll be saving energy for the next mad uprush.

My crazed starlings are tiring, though, and so their mad uprushes don't go as far as I'd like, don't make as much noise as I'd have them do. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that some of them have left the flock and are genuinely resting quietly somewhere, waiting to be the birds I saw last night slipping and soaring singly through the evening air, wing-curve here, tail-flip there, motion and the near-silence of small sound, the joy of flight, the extravagance of simplicity.

I am down to seven class meetings. Of course, one of those meetings is three hours long. But down to seven nonetheless. At this time of the academic year, I also start to fantasize fervently about all that will start getting done once we're past graduation and reunion weekend--once we're firmly in the summer, the sun so high all the time, the front porch my favorite office. In the summers, I head to the post office shortly after noon, when the mail's in boxes; in the springs, at the point where we are now, I realize some evenings that I've simply not made it to the post office at all. In the summers, it is my job to read and write all day long. In the summers, I sleep enough.

This morning, my alarm woke me up from a dream in which someone stole my car while I watched.

Further proof that my father is cooler than cool: a mysterious package arrived on my front porch this morning. Inside? A Manfrotto car window mount for my camera. It is small and sturdy, metal and reliable-seeming. I feel a little bit of trepidation about putting my camera too close to the wind. But I am very excited at the idea of getting to do more vehicular photography without endangering myself.